Power and Love

Adam Kahane’s book, Power and Love, defines power as the need for each person to realize their potential and love as the need to harmonize. His book describes the need to become literate in generate love and generate power.

Preparing a lecture about the German artist Paula Modersohn, Becker I found a picture of the dilemma in a person’s life. Paula was married to an artist whose previous wife had died, leaving behind a daughter. Paula married Otto Modersohn and cared for the family as well as pursuing her work as a painter. She left him to go to Paris more than once in order to learn. After six years of marriage. She finally decided to leave him once and for all.

The first picture is a painting of Paula in Paris painted on her sixth wedding anniversary.

She is naked, and she has just left her husband.

She paints herself expecting a child.

She reveals herself to herself and prepares for the birth of herself as an artist.

The second picture is a photograph of Paula and her daughter Mathilde.

The struggle between her husband and herself was resolved and she returned home confident that he would support her wish to become something. Their reconciliation led to the conception of a child. A few days after the birth of her daughter she rose from her bed to dress. She put flowers in her hair.

As she came to sit down she died of an embolism.

The third picture is a self portrait that she painted in the year of her death.

It is like a grave painting with the artist and her serene gaze looking into liminal space.

When she was young Paula had said that she knew she would not have a very long life but that a festival isn’t any less wonderful for being shorter. She wanted to have painted decent pictures , to have loved and to have had a child.

After her death her husband Otto and the poet Rilke went to her studio where they found four hundred paintings and hundreds of drawings.

Here are the words of the letter she sent her mother before on embarking on her last trip to Paris and the words Rudolf Steiner wrote about women in The Philosophy of Freedom.

Because I am going to be something worthwhile…I can not see how great or small it will be but it will be something self – contained. This steadfast rushing towards my goal is the finest thing in life. There is nothing else like it. If I sometimes appear to not be giving much love then I ask you to remember that I am myself rushing forward the whole time, resting only occasionally so that I can once again rush towards the goal. My energies are being concentrated on this one thing. I do not know whether it may be called egoism. Whatever the case, it is the noblest kind of egoism. I lay your head in my lap from which I came, and thank you for my life.

Your child, Paula.

A letter to her mother on preparing to leave her husband to work in Paris.

It is impossible to understand a human being completely if one takes the concept of genus as the basis of one’s judgment. The tendency to judge according to the genus is at its most stubborn where we are concerned with differences of sex. Almost invariably man sees in woman, and woman in man, too much of the general character of the other sex and too little of what is individual. In practical life this does less harm to men than to women. The social position of women is for the most part such an unworthy one because in so many respects it is determined not as it should be by the particular characteristics of the individual woman, but by the general picture one has of woman’s natural tasks and needs. A man’s activity in life is governed by his individual capacities and inclinations, whereas a woman’s is supposed to be determined solely by the mere fact that she is a woman. She is supposed to be a slave to what is generic, to womanhood in general. As long as men continue to debate whether a woman is suited to this or that profession “according to her natural disposition”, the so-called woman’s question cannot advance beyond its most elementary stage. What a woman, within her natural limitations, wants to become had better be left to the woman herself to decide. If it is true that women are suited only to that profession which is theirs at present, then they will hardly have it in them to attain any other. But they must be allowed to decide for themselves what is in accordance with their nature. To all who fear an upheaval of our social structure through accepting women as individuals and not as females, we must reply that a social structure in which the status of one half of humanity is unworthy of a human being is itself in great need of improvement.

From The Philosophy of Freedom, Part II: The Reality of Freedom, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, Individuality and Genus.

Advertisement